Posts from 2024

  • Custom mechanical keyboard: OS-specific custom RGB lighting with QMK

    Jun 30, 2024
    Electronics
    22 minutes
    qt.ax/kbl

    My old Corsair keyboard has been struggling recently. It has some weird issues, either in hardware or firmware, that cause it to sometimes go crazy and randomly “press” the wrong keys, forcing me to pull out my backup keyboard until the lunacy1 passes. On top of that, managing it requires Corsair’s bloated, Windows-only iCUE software or a reverse-engineered alternative like ckb-next, which isn’t fun for a Linux user like me, and even with ckb-next, the customization is limited.

    So I figured I’d get a new keyboard. I have a few simple requirements:

    1. It should be a 100% keyboard because I use the numpad quite a bit for number entry, e.g. to manage my personal finances;
    2. It should have a backlight since I often use my computer at night in relative darkness, and while I can touch type just fine, being able to see the keyboard is nice;
    3. It should have tactile mechanical switches, but not the obnoxious clicky ones. For reference, my old keyboard has Cherry MX browns, which I liked; and
    4. It should have properly programmable and customizable firmware. QMK is the popular option, so I searched for keyboards supporting that, and failing that, at least keyboards with proper first-party Linux support.

    As it turned out, I couldn’t find any prebuilt mechanical keyboards that ticked all the options and were in stock, so I figured I might just get into the custom mechanical keyboard scene and build my own. Thus began a journey that saw immense frustration and nerd-sniping…

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  • On the Inter-RIR transfer of AS200351 from RIPE NCC to ARIN

    Jun 23, 2024
    BGP
    12 minutes
    qt.ax/irt

    As you might know already, on May 24, 2024, at the RIPE NCC General Meeting, model C for the 2025 charging scheme was adopted. I will not go into the details here, such as the lack of an option to preserve the status quo1, but model C involved adding an annual fee of 50 EUR per ASN, billed to the sponsoring LIR. This meant that the sponsoring LIR for AS200351 would be forced to bill me annually for at least 50 EUR for the ASN, plus some administrative overhead and fees for payment processing2.

    To protest against this fee and save myself some money, I decided to transfer AS200351 to ARIN, which charges no extra for me to hold an additional ASN, given that my current service category at ARIN allows up to 3 ASNs, and I only had one ASN already with ARIN: AS54148.

    And so, on June 2nd, I decided to initiate the process to transfer AS200351, which was in active use, to ARIN. As it turned out, this became an ordeal, especially on the RIPE NCC end. Since I’ve been asked many times about the process, I am writing this post to share my experience, so that you know what to expect.

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  • Cloning Proxmox with LVM Thin Pools

    Feb 17, 2024
    Sysadmin
    13 minutes
    qt.ax/cplt

    During Black Friday last year, I got tempted by a super good offer of a dedicated server in Kansas City with the option of connecting it to the Kansas City Internet Exchange (KCIX). Here are the specs:

    • Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 (8 cores, 16 threads)
    • 64 GB DDR4 RAM
    • 500 GB SSD
    • 1 Gbps unmetered bandwidth

    It was such the perfect thing for AS200351 (if a bit overkill), so I just had to take it. I set it up during the winter holidays, having decided to install Proxmox to run a bunch of virtual machines, and all was well. Except for one thing—the disk.

    You see, the server came with a fancy SAN, with exactly 500 GiB of storage mounted over iSCSI via 10 Gbps Ethernet, backed by a highly reliable ZFS volume (zvol). While this all sounds good on paper, in practice I am barely able to hit over 200 MB/s when doing I/O, even at large block sizes. Nothing I did seemed to help, so I asked the provider to switch it to physical drives.

    Having configured Proxmox just the way I wanted it, I opted against reinstalling it from scratch, instead choosing to clone the disk. The provider suggested using Clonezilla, which should be able to do this sort of disk cloning very quickly. So we found an agreeable time, took the server down, and booted Clonezilla over PXE. All should be good, right?

    As it turns out, this ended up being a super painful experience.

    Editorial note: This story is based on my memory and incomplete console output. While the broad story is correct, the commands provided may not be correct.

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